Before my best friend left for her London adventures, she gave me four bags of books. My excitement was such that I put the bags out of sight in the spare bedroom, where they remained undisturbed for over a month. Not being able to sleep one night, I went into the room; pulled out the first book I could get my hands on, and took it to bed with me. The book was on Ignatius Spirituality, written for small groups attending a retreat, and required the participants to share their reflections on the day’s “challenge” and journal on seven reflections each week. Immediately there were roadblocks for me in the program: I do not share reflections with random people, I don’t journal ever, and I am not fond of challenges calling for any self-imposed improvement.
But I needed sleep, so I read the first week’s reflections, which led me to weeks two through five, not reflecting on the useless challenge questions at the end of each week. However in week five, a question presented a challenge for me and was a cause for reflection: Can I recall a childhood experience that had a lasting impact on my life?1 My immediate response was “books.” Granted, “books” as such are not an “experience,” so I took the liberty of tweaking the question by adding it to my cauldron with a little salt and the eye of a newt and let it simmer for several days until a Domino Tumbling effect occurred and the challenge became: “how have books impacted my life?”
The first three years of my education were nothing special: I read Dick and Jane, saw Spot run, and longed for Sally’s pedal car. In my fourth year of education, I began Verner Elementary School located across the street from Denny Stadium (pre Bear reknown). The first thing I learned was that I did not know anything equal to my classmates’ knowledge. I had learned to read by rote memory and had never heard of sounding out a word phonetically. When given a vocabulary list and assigned to write the meaning of each word, I had to ask the question, “What’s a definition?” I was offered a box of dominoes – a dictionary.
On Friday we were taken to the school library and there I discovered shelves full of books – books that could be checked out and taken home! Thus began an addiction that has never been sated and the dominoes began to accumulate and fall in line. I found more dominoes on my first trip to the public library, located in the Searcy House on Greensboro Avenue where I was issued the key to the world – a library card. In 1958 the library moved down the street to the Jemison Van de Graaf Mansion (Friedman Library). I can still recall the location of the Nancy Drew books – first room on the left, first bookcase, fourth shelf, denim-colored books with the small figure of Nancy carrying a magnifying glass on the cover. And I wanted to own them.
Searcy House2
815 Greensboro Avenue
Jemison-Van de Graaff Mansion2
1305 Greensboro Avenue
It may be hard to describe the thrill that I felt the first time my sister took me to Lustig’s Bookstore but I still remember the smell of the books and how their aroma enthralled me. Lustig’s was located downtown on Seventh Street and was owned by two sisters who worked in the store. With my first purchase of a Nancy Drew book, The Bungalow Mystery (Series Number 3), the Lustig sisters presented me with a domino. I began to skip school lunches, saving my twenty-five cent allotment each day, and going to Lustig’s where I could to buy a Nancy Drew book – cost $1.25. I began a collection of these treasured books as well as the habit of visiting the library routinely.
In high school, I answered a magazine ad and joined the Doubleday Book Club, which sent me two books each month if I did not send a cancellation notice back on time. Obviously this domino occasionally misfired because I received books that I had no interest in reading. I cancelled the membership after making the required number of purchases and joined another, the Literary Guild, cancelled it later, and rejoined Doubleday, a process that recycled year in and year out.
Gayfer’s Department Store opened in McFarland Mall in the late 1960s with a large book department. I started reading paperback romance novels reminiscent of Hallmark Channel movies. Several years later Bookland opened in the mall, followed by a Bookland in the new University Mall in the 1980s. Then came Books-A-Million and Barnes and Noble on McFarland Boulevard. We were regular customers of these stores where we spent countless Friday evenings touring the shelves and buying books. As well as the chain bookstores, Ernest and Hadley is a locally owned and operated store specializing in local authors and special interest books. It is truly a great place to acquire dominoes and inspiration. My taste in literature varied from great classical novels to Victorian Gothic, murder mysteries, espionage thrillers, and horror. With each book I placed another domino in a row. Authors became dominoes to me and I accumulated them and stacked the shelves with my collection.
Recently I visited the PBS website to vote for my favorite author, a selection to be made from one hundred great writers. The dilemma overwhelmed me because my favorite book is The Stand by Stephen King but with ninety-nine other authors on the ballot, I wanted to vote for Jane Austen, Charles Dickens or Agatha Christie. But I have other favorites including Alexander McCall Smith, Daniel Silva, Louise Penny, P.D. James, Edgar Allen Poe, Sir Author Conan Doyle, Bill Bryson, and Rick Bragg – not all of which were on the list. I voted for Austen although I didn’t like Emma until it was re-written by Alexander McCall Smith. But The Stand still stands out as my “fav.”
I read somewhere that Domino Tumbling is an art form and if that is true, my dominoes form a majestic tree with the trunk being a quest for knowledge. The trunk rises and forks into branches representing genres of literature. From the branches grow the limbs, which are the authors. Finally the leaves are the books and sprout from the limbs along with the fruits of reading. The fruits are our experiences. Care must be taken with the fruits because they present a major pitfall. When someone mentions a book and my intellect is challenged to read (interpreted as buy) the book, I’m stuck with reading about Dodos singing their mating coos on an island torn from a Persian rug and I learn something! Such is the Domino Tumbling Effect, it is a wise thing to do but true wisdom is gained from knocking them over and experiencing the chain reaction.
1Challenge 2000, Mark Link, S.J., Tabor Publishing, Allen Texas
2Tuscaloosa Virtual Museum, tavm.omeda.net
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